Empty Pockets

by Dale Herd

  “Hello, Mom.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Hello, Mom,” Celeste says louder.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “It’s Celeste!”

  “Oh, Celeste. How’s the family?”

  Celeste is afraid of this. This is the third time she has heard her mother say this. Celeste has no family. Her mother is her only family.

  “They’re fine, Mom.”

  “Is John with you?”

  “John? Yes, Mom, he is.”

  John is Celeste’s brother who died two months ago in August after a double heart attack while on vacation with his wife. The first attack was in a Boise, Idaho, hotel room. The second, occurring almost immediately following the installation of a pacemaker, was in the Boise hospital. Barely surviving this attack, while being prepped for the necessary second surgery, he said, “I can’t go on with this. I can’t do this,” and passed away.

  “Tell him to call me,” Celeste’s mom says. “I need to talk to him.”

  “I will, Mom.”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Celeste, Mom. I’m your daughter, Celeste.”

  “That’s right. Celeste. You are Celeste. You sound just like her.”

  “It is me, Mom.”

  “For heaven’s sakes, I know it’s you. How’s the family?”

  “They’re all fine, Mom.”

  “Give them all my love.”

  “I will, Mom.”

  “You take care of them. Good-bye now.”

  “Bye, Mom.”

  “Bye.”

  The line goes silent.

  Celeste hangs up the phone and walks over to the kitchen window and stands looking out. Yellow, gold, and russet leaves cover the backyard. They shift in the wind. The boles of the large maples are gray, the skeletal branches still holding a few of the leaves. Several more sail off and flutter down onto the others on the yellowing grass.

  “Dear God,” Celeste says, trying to think about anything but this.

  Get out of here, she thinks, do something, go for a walk . . .

  Death

  The time is November in 2013. It’s an unusually warm evening out. The restaurant, rated by the Village Voice as serving the best Chinese food in the city, is in Midtown Manhattan East. At a corner table on the left side of the room sit two well-dressed couples sharing a variety of dishes: stir-fried lotus with ginger and scallions, sliced chicken breast with baby bok choy, spicy hot and sour cellophane noodles, braised assorted fresh mushrooms, pan seared pork dumplings in a chili-soy sauce, along with both steamed white and brown rice, and different pots of tea; oolong, jasmine, and black.

  “Twenty-five thousand people a day were unloaded from the trains. They gassed twenty-five thousand people a day. He watched them arriving . . .” one of the men is saying.

  The other man’s father, in 1946, brought a large black-and-white photo journal back from Germany. The father had taken it from the khaki duffle along with his other trophies: the small, black rectangular collar patch with the twin white lightning bolts on it; the heavy, dull, gray-green Wehrmacht steel helmet whose sides efficiently covered the ears and back of the neck, complete with leather liner and sweat-soaked leather chinstrap, that had been selected to fit the boy’s head; the heavy iron and wooden sheathed German infantry bayonet whose blade, when the boy finally saw it, had a wide grove down its black length that prevented it from sticking when being pulled from a body. The father had left the journal out on the kitchen table. The boy had looked at it, even though he’d been told not to. There were thirty or so pages. The pictures on the thick paper were grainy in appearance. Each page was covered with naked bodies in huge piles stacked in open dirt pits. The bodies were skeletal. They lay in every direction on top of each other. The heads had no hair. You couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead. They looked dead, but the boy heard his father say that many of them were alive. It was something the boy couldn’t understand. He heard his father talking to his mother. His mother said that couldn’t be true; they have to be dead. He heard his mother saying don’t let him see it. He heard his father say the stench was unbearable. The boy didn’t know what the word stench meant.

  The man who is talking is the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor. He had found his grandfather’s diaries.

  “He watched them arrive, and watched them being unloaded, both men and women and children; there were many children . . .” the man is saying.

  He went on with more of it. When he finished, no one at the table said anything for several moments.

  All There Is

  Cutler walked up the wet concrete driveway toward the side of the house. In the past thirteen years nothing had changed. The clapboard was still painted the same sundown-tinted beige. The window frames were still green. There was the rust on the wire screen in the side door. The garbage cans were in the same place. The grass along the back was still bright, well cared for, freshly mown. The car was different. Not the black, four-door, big-block Buick Century that would have been at least twenty years old by now, but a freshly washed, silver-gray, two-year-old vw Jetta, water dripping off its fenders, sitting mute under the carport roof. A white plastic bucket with a small sponge floating in soapy water sat by the steps.

  He went to the door, knocked, and a young blonde girl with short hair opened the screen door and looked out.

  He asked if the Moss family still lived there. “Beverly Moss?”

  The girl, still holding the door open, looked at him.

  She smiled.

  “No,” she said. “She hasn’t lived here for a number of years.”

  “You have any idea where she went?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Hey,” she said, “you’re doing the right thing.”

  Cutler didn’t know what she meant. He saw she was a very sweet-looking girl, a little older than he first thought, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two years old. The blond hair was natural and roughly cut. She had a pair of yellow rubber gloves on and was barefoot and wore white shorts and a faded blue T-shirt.

  “How is that?”

  “You find someone and you spend your life loving them. That’s all there is,” she said.

  She smiled at him again and closed the door.

  Colophon

  Empty Pockets was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Caslon.

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